Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“I’ll drop the guns at some place in Little Rock, if that’s the way the decision goes,” said Bob.

“You figure he’s on the level, Rawley?” Braxton asked.

Rawley nodded imperceptibly.

“That one doesn’t talk much, does he?” asked Nick.

“I speak when I have something to say,” said Rawley. “I save a lot of time that way. Okay, Sniper Swagger, you think you’re so smart, but I figured out your next move in the investigation, where the genius FBI agent here couldn’t, and I went ahead with it, so I have the document in question. That’s why I have the answers and you never will.”

“He can talk,” said Nick.

“He’s a goddamned genius,” said Braxton.

“Your initial problem was conceptual,” said Rawley. “As I followed the investigation, I have to say that you were certainly doing a professional job, and a few of the discoveries were impressive. Tracking Baby Face back to Lebman by means of the compensator, that’s very solid. But it’s also clear to me that you have reached the limits of your known world and it’s unlikely that you’ll get any further. What that represents is a failure not of logic but imagination. Your brains are limited by boundaries. You can’t see beyond them, have no concept of what’s beyond them, and, lacking that, no process for navigating them.”

“Don’t he talk purty?” said Braxton.

“No points for style and grammar,” said Bob, “only content.”

“Oh, it’s about to get interesting. Go on, brother, the floor’s all yours. Oh, Mr. FBI Man, sir, maybe you could change my diapers, as they’re beginning to chafe.”

Braxton enjoyed his own joke immensely, and Rawley did him the courtesy of letting him finish his laugh.

“You scoured the overworld,” he finally said, “that is, the bourgeois matrix of propriety, rule, order, documentation, memory, index, memoir, rumor, myth, and Google. You were thorough, precise, and diligent. But you never got close to the truth. The truth isn’t in the overworld. It’s in the underworld.”

He let that sink in.

“We Grumley, and all like us, we like what we do. And so we talk and remember and pass along. We know it’s historically important and explains so much. We know it tells us things you could never understand, many of the whys and hows of history. The fact that it’s ours, and not yours, is fabulously enjoyable.”

“Get on with it,” said Swagger.

“I looked at the same data you did, but I saw possibilities extending into our world. One of the things I noticed was that the single witness to that last day lived until 1974.”

“We read the Bureau interrogations of John Paul Chase,” said Nick. “He seemed to say a lot, but he really didn’t say much. He didn’t even call it a Monitor, just a machine gun.”

“He was a professional criminal and, as you will see, he had a mandate to lie. So he told the story that your people wanted to hear, and they were so pleased to hear it, they bought it. It became the narrative. But it’s far from the truth.”

“And you learned the truth?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, I had to find what remained of his presence on earth. Not easy. You could not have done it. But I saw he spent his time at Alcatraz, and I asked older Grumley to come up with names of other Alcatraz veterans. It took some time, but, one by one, I got in contact with these old salts and found one who remembered Chase as quite a mild fellow who, when paroled, went to live with a relative in Sausalito, his hometown. The birth records of Sausalito led me to the tax records, which led me to Chase’s great-granddaughter, and, through a lawyer, I approached, feeling my two hundred forty pounds and KILL and MAIM tattooed on my knuckles might scare her off. Through the lawyer, I put out a gentle tender. You could never have done that, Swagger, because the crucial connect with the ex-Alcatrazer is denied you. You could never have found him. And if you had, he wouldn’t have spoken to you, overworlder. He sang to me. This is why it’s so much fun being a criminal.”

Swagger said nothing. Dammit, he was impressed. Maybe he could have — but maybe not. Anyhow, Rawley was back on his pulpit.

“So here’s the John Paul Chase story. He was paroled in 1968. An old man but spunky. He went to live with a great-granddaughter and spent the next six years in pleasant circumstances in his hometown, painting bad landscapes. To Grumley, that’s a happy ending: comfort, memories, the sense of singularity and accomplishment the professional criminal feels, because no matter how you punish him, you’ve only punished him for a fraction of his crimes. He has the last laugh. And, believe me, John Paul had plenty to laugh about.”

“Where is this going?” said Nick.

“To the heart of the heart of the matter. Now, would you mind shutting up so I can finish?”

Even Nick’s irritation was tamed by curiosity. Was this it? Could this unlikely creature with his giant guns, tattoos, skull fractures, and over-brightened teeth actually know something?

“Initially, Chase was silent. He enjoyed it too much to share it. He never talked about the old days because that was his treasure and he enjoyed hoarding it. His great-granddaughter begged him to write it all down, but he wouldn’t because he said nobody cared and spilling it all for nothing would be disrespectful.”

“But he talked in his sleep?” asked Nick.

“No, the environment changed radically in 1972. Can you guess why?”

“You’re ahead of us on everything,” said Swagger, “I guess you’re ahead of us on 1972.”

“I guess so. The great American movie The Godfather is released, from the Mario Puzo bestseller. It’s the rare hit that deserves its fame and fortune, but it ignites a fire in popular culture regarding organized crime. Mobster, mobster, mobster, twenty-four/seven, and for the next two years three out of every four movies, and six out of every ten books, are about the gangster world. Can you imagine the impact this had on the old man living in the basement in Sausalito who knew things? It was like he was holding stock in a gold mine or Haloid before it became Xerox. So finally, he sat down and wrote it, the true tale of the end of FBI war on the motorized bandits, in a public park in Barrington, Illinois — oh, yes, and elsewhere — on November twenty-seventh, 1934. He wrote it down. I’ve read it. Several times. Would you like to, fellows?”

Silence.

“You know the price? Snip the flex-cuffs, hand over the Monitor and our artillery, and be quit of us, just as we will be quit of you.”

“You have the thing?”

“Not only do I have it, I have it not far from here. You’ll laugh at this, Swagger. Not only were we not going to kill you, we were going to leave it with you, so that when the sodium pentothal wore off, you’d know that you hadn’t been robbed, you’d been given fair value: your goods for ours. So you’d have no need to come looking for us. We don’t want you dogging us, any more than you’d want us dogging you. Call it professional courtesy.”

“How can I verify it? I mean, even if it’s authentic and you put it in front of me, how can I know it’s authentic?”

“Well, first of all, does it seem likely that Brax and I had a three-hundred-page handwritten manuscript in several ’thirties-era notebooks fabricated against the possibility of this occurrence? We’re smart, but nobody’s that smart. I’d guess you could have the rag content of the paper, the age of the ink, the fading of the cover pages, any number of forensic factors, analyzed.”

“That would only take six weeks. Do you want to sit in that hole in flex-cuffs for six weeks while we check? It’s okay by me.”